As many of you will be aware, over the last few days a documentary by
the Invisible Children has gone viral-
throughout the web. When first looking at this, you are presented by the
horrifying truth that Joseph Kony has been committing crimes against humanity
for the last 20+ years. Literally thousands of children have been abducted in
the middle of the night and taken away by his organization. These children, as
young as 6/7, are forced to either become child soldiers or sex slaves.
The child soldiers are made to be dependent on Joseph Kony. He does this
by giving them drugs and other substances. Kony then forces these children to
kill their own parents and or beat innocent people to death. If they resist,
they are killed.
The female children are turned into sex slaves and are used by the LRA's
(Kony's organization) top officers.
It is clear to us all that this is absolutely disgraceful in the modern
world we live in and should not be happening.
So, this is where Invisible Children come in. They have been spreading
the word about Kony and his ways over the last 8 years- Brilliant! Somebody/
people who care enough to take action against his evil ways!
The current campaign recommends people to spread literally hundreds of
thousands of posters around the world to spread awareness about Kony. The
charity is also urging people to buy bracelets and action packs, all of which
are not cheap and cost around $30 (£19).
On the surface, everything may seem all well and good, when in reality;
many charities are corrupt and not effective.
Invisible Children
has been convicted time and time again. As a registered not-for-profit, all the
money it spends it clearly listed online. In 2011 they spent $8,676,614. (£5,512,287.581) Only 32% of this went
to direct action (Found on page 6) with the rest of the money going to travel
and staff salaries. This is not the best way to campaign against something. One
of the charity watchdog’s Charity Navigator rates their credibility at 2/4 because they
haven’t had their expenses checked over independently
Their money supports the Ugandan/Sudan government’s army.
Both the Ugandan army and Sudan army are full with claims of rape and looting,
but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of
any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in
Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006.
Still, the bulk of Invisible Children’s spending isn’t on
supporting African militias, but on awareness and filmmaking. Which can be
great However, the Foreign Affairs committee of America has claimed that Invisible
Children (among other charities) “manipulates facts for strategic purposes,
exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s
use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be
sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.” He is most
definitely evil and needs to be stopped, but lying about the amount of crime which is going on, is wrong.
Conclusion:
Is all this
awareness good?? Yes. But these problems are highly difficult to deal with and
cannot be solved by postering, filmmaking and changing your Facebook profile
picture to a logo for invisible children. Giving your money
and public support to Invisible Children so they can spend it on supporting badly advised violent intervention, and movie #12 isn’t helping. Is this the
definite answer to it all? Certainly not! However, it appears that some people
are supporting something they don’t know enough about and are doing it for the sake of it.
Sources of
information:
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